Bodied Knowing

Bodied knowing is a state of being long familiar to dancers and other performers. Historically, dancers and others who wrote about dance and movement frequently grappled with articulating the experience of bodied knowledge in learning and teaching as well as in the expressive or communicative capacity of performance. If philosophy has lost primacy of place to science in recent centuries, it still lent credibility to a suspect art; writers who took a particular interest in bodied knowing provided language and conceptual frameworks that enabled movement artists to more convincingly legitimize their experience to those who were skeptical of the cognitive dimensions of dance. The idea of body as archive must start here, at the moment that bodied experience interacts with the world and ideas, creates history, holds memories, and moves in the present and into the future.

Alternative notions of cognition as more fully embodied and situated in the world were reflected in the work of early theorists such as William James and John Dewey, Jean Piaget, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as dance physiologists and educators such as Mabel Elsworth Todd and Margaret H'Doubler. If you search the Internet today for "body" and "knowing," you will get hundreds of hits for essays, monographs, books, lectures, symposia, institutes, and university departments featuring "embodied cognition." This robust field of study challenges the more traditional approach to cognition, which — developing from the emerging sciences of experimental and empirical psychology as well as neurobiology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and strongly influenced by parallel research in computer science and artificial intelligence in the 1950s — focused almost exclusively on brain function.

Science-based critiques of traditional cognitive theory increased in numbers, and by the 1970s empirical research in the developing and interrelated fields of situated, embedded, enactive, and embodied cognition confirmed that the body as a whole is integral to cognition and the acquisition and processing of knowledge, and that this knowledge is influenced by the body's sociocultural context. These scientific advances coincided with a renewed interest in phenomenology, gender studies, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism, and any contemporary discussion of the body as an archive must take all these developments into account. Despite variations in theoretical approaches, there is growing acknowledgment of the "bodily nature of cognitive agency." In a culture that primarily lends value to phenomena that can be verified objectively and scientifically, this attention to embodiment as a new paradigm is welcome.

In this section of the book, Alain Platel locates the performer's body as a site that knows more than it can say, asking dancers to dig deeply into the archive of their own or others' bodily movements to create new and shared movement that in turn augments their own repertoires of movement action and memory. Tomie Hahn turns her eye on the performances of individuals' embodied archives and on both the structures that transmit this knowledge into the world and the reciprocal shaping of these structures of transmission by the outside world. Juhani Pallasmaa writes that architecture, like dance, moves outward from the body in acts of expression, constituting a sphere of externalized order and memory. Meg Stuart contributes a warm-up plan that asks performers to not only be physically vulnerable but also to draw on their own archives of memory to become more cognitively aware, responsive, and imaginative. The research and practice of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen focus on the systematic deepening of awareness about all that the body remembers and archives, starting in the womb and tracing through the development of human movement patterns. Ralph Lemon's two brief pieces of writing invite us to consider and experience his processes of living, dancing, and making, beginning with pleasure as biology or memory and moving to the tension between the insistent memory of the trained body and the creative act.

— Linda Caruso Haviland

ALAIN PLATEL

EVERYONE HAS SOMETHING TO TELL

When I graduated from university (Ghent, Belgium) in the early 1980s with a master's degree in psychology and educational sciences, my ambitions were clear: I would become a good remedial educationalist in one of the cerebral palsy centers where I had worked as an intern. Now, thirty years later, I realize that I have spent most of my active life as a dance theater director in a company called les ballets C de la B. What started out as a small group of friends and amateurs making short dance theater performances has evolved into a professional dance theater company performing on stages all over the...